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Welkom - One of South Africa's biggest gold firms, Harmony
Gold Mining Company [JSE:HAR] has taken the drastic step of banning all food
underground to cut supply lines to gangs of illegal miners used to staying deep
in the mines for months on end, threatening lives and official production.
With gold mining around Welkom, 200 km south of
Johannesburg, dating back to the 1930s, the bedrock is criss-crossed by a
myriad network of tunnels that provide perfect cover and multiple entry points
for illegal miners.
Bosses of Harmony Gold's 2.4 km deep Phakisa mine - one of
the world's deepest - have tried blocking up old shafts and installing
stadium-style turnstiles at the top of the main shaft to stop imposters
slipping through.
In January this year, they tightened the screw by imposing a
total ban on food to prevent official miners bringing in supplies to sell or
give to their unofficial counterparts.
"There are two things you need to survive underground:
food and water. You can always get water down a mine but the food ban has made
a real difference," Harmony chief executive Graham Briggs told Reuters
this week during a mine visit.
Unions agreed to the ban - as long as it was accompanied by
a free meal at the end of a shift - even though it means teams of men will
consume nothing but water during an eight-hour shift pounding at the
gold-bearing rock in sweltering heat.
Although nobody knows the full extent of a problem that is
literally hidden deep in the bowels of the earth, the countermeasures
introduced by firms such as Harmony suggest the threat from illegal mining in
South Africa is significant.
Once underground, the men will stay there for weeks, if not
months, subsisting on food brought in from above ground.
They make a living by crushing the ore by hand and panning
out the specks of gold or lighting fires beneath ad hoc smelters. In some cases
they will even undertake their own drilling and blasting - at great risk to
themselves and others.
Reports of underground clashes between armed gangs and mine
security officers are common in the domestic media, as are accidents caused by
unofficial mining activity.
In March, up to 20 men were killed after a rock fall at an
abandoned gold mine near Johannesburg, and at least 10 died in May when a
tunnel collapsed at a disused diamond mine.
Although mine owners are not blamed for such tragedies - and
will often send in their own rescue experts to pull out victims - an aggressive
"zero harm" government safety push means they cannot afford to have
outsiders wandering around underground.
"There's a very big risk to safety in these mines
because illegal miners could mine pillars, boundary walls and basically
dismantle the structures established to ensure stability," said May
Hermanus, a former chief mines inspector.
"That's very serious."
Despite the success of Harmony's food ban, the overall
threat is unlikely to go away while gold is fetching $1 600 an ounce and South
Africa's 25% unemployment rate pushes many young men to risk everything to eke
out a living.
"These guys are crazy," Briggs said. "They will try and go down a vertical shaft with just a few bits of old rope."
